[Solved] Debian 11 Bullseye HELP!

[hawghaven]

Hi All...
I made a big mistake this morning in Debian 11.
I went to run "freshclam" from the command line, when it failed and told me it needed permission to write to /var/lib/clamav. to check my permissions.
I went to that directory and used this command:
sudo chmod -vR 660 /
from the /var/lib/clamav directory.
Well, it started going crazy on a lot of files, I knew something was wrong and quickly gave the "CTRL-C command, then my screen went blank and I can not login anymore.
I think I broke it. Is there any HELP out there or am I just out of luck???
I have a very sick feeling about this. Any HELP would be great.

Thanks
P.S. I did not have Timeshift running.

[arochester]

When it said you need permission to write it meant that you should become root by using

Code: Select all

su - 

or

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 sudo 

When you say that you cannot login, what exactly happens? What do you see?

Can you access a rescue mode from the Grub screen?

[jmgibson1981]

Code: Select all

sudo chmod -vR 660 /

You wrote 660 permissions to the entire drive. I hope you have backups. This is not realistically recoverable. You can boot live and try to get your data out but this is a prime lesson on why backups are so important and always double checking exactly what you type when you run anything with sudo or root. My condolences.

[hawghaven]

Thanks for the advice. I had a feeling it was going to be bad. It just gives me a good excuse to change Debian flavors. I never really liked that one. I was able to boot up with a "LIVE" boot and extract my HOME directory out. I will reload today. Thanks again for your kind words

"My condolences"

.

[jmgibson1981]

You aren't the first and won't be the last. Many of us have done something similar. I know I have.
GNU stuff is wonderful, but it can be much less forgiving of mistakes. Price one pays for having that much more power and control of your system.

Learn from it, don't run from it